Yesterday was M.’s 9th birthday, her first since her father died. I tried my best to make it a good day for her, and I think it was. We got through the whole day without her being sad at all, which is good. I, of course, kept thinking about what he was missing, and how […]

Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The Year of Magical Thinking has been on my reading list since it first came out at the end of 2005, and I just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. In looking for books […]

As with most of us, I love the idea of reusing and recycling things that could otherwise just be useless. Pallets have been hugely popular over the years for the sheer variety of things you can do with them, either as a whole or by taking them apart. Reclaimed wood, especially barn wood, is just […]

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Book Review: The Dying Times by Brian Kittrell

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I recently received a PDF copy of the book The Dying Times by Brian Kittrell for review.

It took me a while to get through the book, mainly due to scheduling issues on my part, but I finally finished it yesterday. Normally, I have a good idea of what I want to say when I finish reading, and can jump right in with the review, but with this one I needed to take a day.

This book, Kittrell’s first book in a series called The Survivor Chronicles, tells the story of Nadene, a girl who becomes caught up in a race to find a safe place after a zombie apocalypse sweeps the eastern seaboard. Nadene, along with her mother and a few others, are trying to get to Texas where they think, for reasons I won’t get into, that they will be able to find safe haven. The book covers her journey toward safety, and the many trials she meets along the way. Nadene also is somewhat psychic, being able to somehow know when something bad is just about to happen or will happen soon.

I really wanted to love this book. I always do when I’m reviewing something by a new or relatively unknown author. I didn’t like it. It was an interesting premise, it moved along at a good pace, although I found the typos in what turned out to be a PDF version of an already published book to be aggravating. That always drives me nuts. I was an English major. I can’t help it.

The writing was just uninspired. There was nothing really new and different about it. I think there not anything new to tell about a zombie apocalypse that hasn’t already been said, and this book certainly backed that idea. There are zombies, people get eaten or turned into zombies, survivors try to survive by getting away from the zombies. Yes, there is a slightly psychic girl, but that brings me to another issue I had with the book — the characters. I found all of them unlikable. They bickered, they complained, they floundered. There were moments where they did well, but mostly I spent a good part of the time I was reading it wanting to smack someone on the back of the head and say, “Quit being an ass!”

Would I recommend this book? Probably not. If you’re into zombies and looking for a relatively quick read, go for it. Maybe your take on it will be different from mine. And it is the start of a series so if you like it, you can already get the second book, The War of the Dead, which came out on February 1st. Kittrell has also released Harvey’s Diner, a collection of short story format survivor fiction.